Barraclough (Kindred Spirits, 1989, etc.) makes a big deal of a morass of lies and sexual misalliances beneath the strictly moralistic faáade of a Victorian English family. Written in the voice of Hester Johanna Coppen, the story begins when she is a seven-year-old living in North Kent. Her father, a cruel and unforgiving man, travels to the city each day to work. Hester and her older brother, Gregory, know they are not loved by their parents, and they also can see that their parents have a very different attitude to their sister Clara. It turns out that their mother isn't their mother at all: She's their stepmother, who had left her own husband and young son to live with Hester's father while his wife, Hester's real mother, was recovering from an illness in Italy, where she eventually died. Clara is their love child. On her 18th birthday, Hester's invited to join her Aunt Zelda, her mother's sister, and her son Max in Italy. The drizzly hypocrisy of London is replaced by the lively world of art, opera, Tuscan sensuality, and the rich social life of Florence. First Hester discovers art—Michelangelo's David and the paintings of Botticelli and Filippo Lippi; this is quickly followed by the discovery of sex, or at least of desire. At a performance of Rigoletto she is transported into a state of ecstasy, a mournful, hopeless love, when she hears Orso Orsini sing. The recounting of the passion of the innocent, repressed young woman is charming and beautifully crafted. What doesn't work is the rendering of the opera star as the novel's hero. Orsini never emerges as more than a figure of Hester's passionate fantasies. Their romance, too dependent on ridiculous intrigue, is unconvincing, and in the end, the book is just as statically beholden to genre conventions as Hester's father is to Victorian ones.
Pub Date: July 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10980-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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